POP MUSIC

POP MUSIC; Who Else Would Name a Foundation for a Roadie?

By J. PEDER ZANE

Published: June 26, 1994

THE COMPOSER ROBERT Simpson has garnered great praise but little support during his long career, a predicament that has left many of his works unrecorded. "It's Simpson's luck," he says. "What's Simpson's luck? It's bad luck." So he was "marvelously astonished" when he received a $10,000 money order from some outfit in America called the Rex Foundation.

"My agent said they were associated with an American music group called the Grateful Dead," recalls the 73-year-old composer, who used the grant to help record his Ninth Symphony. "I laughed and said, 'Good heavens, only someone with a name like that would want to help me.' "

The Dead call it Lone Ranger philanthropy. Brandishing fat checks instead of silver bullets, the San Francisco rock band has donated $4.5 million, often anonymously, since establishing Rex, which is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. In addition to supporting obscure composers, it has set up scholarships that have enabled Salvadoran refugees to go to camp and Sioux women to study medicine, assisted the saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders and the Lithuanian Olympic team, and financed programs to eradicate blindness in Nepal, clean up rivers in Alabama, protect striped bass in California and feed the homeless in Boston.

"We look for things that have fallen through the cracks of the big charities, that need an angel to come down and give them a shot," says Phil Lesh, the band's bassist.

Rex is also unlike other charities because of what it doesn't do: It has no endowment, no fund-raising campaigns and no paid staff. It solicits no grant proposals, rarely advertises its good works and raises almost all its money at rock concerts at which the Grateful Dead perform.

"We play some benefits; we make some money; we give that money away," says Mickey Hart, one of the Dead's two drummers. "Then we go play some more benefits so we can have more money to give away."

In this era of limelight activism, when celluloid messiahs often draw less attention to their cause than their celebre, the Dead have been quietly donating time and money since they formed in 1965. And at a time when the 1960's are both overglamorized and rashly demonized, the Rex Foundation is a reminder that that decade's better impulses are relevant today.

REX DRAWS ITS INSPIRATION from two sources: a former roadie and an old television series. "We named the foundation after Donald Rex Jackson, who was killed in a car crash in 1976," explains Mr. Hart. "He embodied this great generous spirit. He was wild, a renegade who'd do anything, and I think Rex has some of that spirit.

"It's also like that old show 'The Millionaire' where someone you don't know enters your life and gives you the chance to turn it around," he adds. "I like to think we're doing that through Rex."

It was this James-Dean-meets-Mother-Teresa spirit, he said, that guided him to use Rex money to go behind the barbed-wire gates of San Quentin and record the prison's gospel choir. Like many Rex grants, it came about through a strange brew of karma and serendipity. In 1991 the Gyoto Tantric Choir -- Tibetan monks whom Mr. Hart helped bring to America -- felt the presence of "trapped souls" as they passed the prison in a van. "They wanted to go right in, but we told them that would be a little difficult," Mr. Hart says. When the monks later performed at San Quentin, he heard the prison's gospel choir and "was blown away."

"Here was this flower blossoming in this poison garden," he says.

They began rehearsing during the same week that Robert Alton Harris became the first man in 25 years to be executed in California's gas chamber. "The air was thick," Mr. Hart recalls. "It was bristling with lightning. It was on fire." And then something amazing happened. "The guards started coming off the towers when they heard the music. I turn around and there's a captain playing the drums, there's a lieutenant on the organ, guards and inmates were mixing and singing sacred songs."

The album, entitled "He's All I Need," peaked at No. 28 on the Billboard gospel charts. All proceeds went to a fund for victims of the inmates.

Mr. Hart knows that the project did not transform the felons into choirboys -- although they have started a feeder group for parolees. "Whether the light goes on, that's up to the individual, but I think we gave some of them the power to turn it on."

It also helped him repay an old debt. As a child in Brooklyn, he was sent to camp through a program for the underprivileged. Around the campfire, counselors handed out tom-toms and the youngsters mimicked Mohican rites. "I'd never seen the drum used in a ritual setting before, as a force of power, spirit, healing and community," he said. "And a light went on. I stumbled, blundered into a life-giving experience that changed me forever."

Before the Dead had money to give away, the band played for free; in fact, its first show as the Grateful Dead was a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1965.

The idea for a foundation occurred as early as 1972, but every time the Dead came close to pulling together the necessary funds, quixotism intruded. They were in retirement from late 1974 to 1976. Once they paid off debts from their failed record label, they decided to jam at the Great Pyramid in Egypt in 1978. They spent $500,000, putting them in a financial squeeze for two more years. As the 80's dawned, the group moved from playing clubs and theaters to larger places like Madison Square Garden. "While every creep in America started making a billion dollars on Wall Street, we started making a lot of money," says Dennis McNally, the group's publicist. "And coincidentally, we responded by figuring out a way to give it away."